LIVE AND LEARN

I used to think that the picture you see in a camera’s viewfinder is the image you would get when you tripped the shutter. However, I just learned more about how to be a better photographer from one 17 page pdf than from all the photography knowledge I have gained up to this point.

The lightbulb moment💡. The image is just a low-resolution jpg image of the actual photo. It does not show all the variables of light being reflected from the ‘stuff’ in the picture.

Second lightbulb moment💡. The more light being reflected from the ‘stuff’ in the picture the more information that part of the picture contains. So dark portions of the picture contain much less information than lighter portions. Dark equals noise and lighter equals more information.

This new way of understanding photography has made the earth move under my feet. With all the information I have read about photography, videos I have watched, images I have stared at, why has this not made sense to me in the past? No clue. Perhaps a thick head.

Another “earth-shattering KABOOM!” for me was that a histogram is merely the representation of the different tones of light in a picture. With a digital camera, manipulating the exposure, f-stop and ISO to alter the location of the various peaks in a histogram is perhaps the best way to take a picture.

‘Expose to the right’ is the saying which explains this. What this means is that what would commonly be understood as overexposing a picture, that is allowing more light into the camera than what one would normally consider, is a better way to take pictures. That is as long as you don’t ‘blow out’ the exposure, don’t allow way too much light in, which would be represented by a trailing line from a peak touching the far right edge of a histogram.

You see, with image editing software you can ‘process’ how much information or how little information you are seeing. Because there is a lot of information contained in what on the surface looks like a slightly overexposed image, you can reduce the exposure and adjust the blacks and shadows information in the image to a point where the colours viewed are bright, beautiful and vibrant vice dark and dull.

So, why am I learning more about photography? Well, it is one pillar of my becoming a working adventurer. If you are like me, a nice photograph of a subject I am interested in will capture my attention far more than just plain text. A dull photograph of the same subject may not capture my attention and cause me to read the accompanying story and just keep flipping or scrolling.

Photography and videography are critical to the storytelling aspect of being a working adventurer travelling around the world in the boat I am building. Describing a location in a post is one thing, but also seeing its beauty and colour is entirely different.

Source: Journal Of Wildlife Photography